Healthcare Wasn’t In The Constitution

There is no mention of health care, or how to pay for it, in the Constitution, because for the men who wrote it health care wasn’t worth paying very much for. It remained that way until relatively recently. The science of medicine didn’t begin to resemble what we know today until the late nineteenth century. Until about 1900, many American medical schools were no better than the shadier for-profit colleges of today. In “The Great Influenza,” John M. Barry writes that at the time “it was more difficult to get into a respectable American college than into an American medical school…. Many schools bestowed a medical degree upon students who simply attended lectures and passed examinations; in some, students could fail several courses, never touch a single patient, and still get a medical degree.”